Invited speakers

Objectives

Control and analysis of the timing of computations is crucial to many domains of system engineering, be it, e.g., for ensuring timely response to stimuli originating in an uncooperative environment, or for synchronising components in VLSI. Reflecting this broad scope, timing aspects of systems from a variety of domains have been treated independently by different communities in computer science and control. Researchers interested in semantics, verification and performance analysis study models such as timed automata and timed Petri nets, the digital design community focuses on propagation and switching delays, while designers of embedded controllers have to take account of the time taken by controllers to compute their responses after sampling the environment, as well as of the dynamics of the controlled process during this span.

Timing-related questions in these separate disciplines do have their particularities. However, there is a growing awareness that there are basic problems (of both scientific and engineering level) that are common to all of them. In particular, all these sub-disciplines treat systems whose behaviour depends upon combinations of logical and temporal constraints; namely, constraints on the temporal distances between occurrences of successive events. Often, these constraints cannot be separated, as the intrinsic dynamics of processes couples them, necessitating models, methods, and tools facilitating their combined analysis. Reflecting this, FORMATS 2018 promotes submissions on hybrid discrete-continuous systems, and will promote a special session on this topic.

Submission Guidelines

FORMATS 2018 solicits high-quality papers reporting research results and/or experience reports related to the topics mentioned above. Submitted papers must contain original, unpublished contributions, not submitted for publication elsewhere. The papers should be submitted electronically in PDF, following the Springer LNCS style and ethical guidelines. In particular, every author has contributed sufficiently to the intellectual scientific work. Submissions should not exceed 15 pages in length (not including the bibliography, which is thus not restricted), but may be supplemented with a clearly marked appendix, which will be reviewed at the discretion of the program committee.

List of Topics

The aim of FORMATS is to promote the study of fundamental and practical aspects of timed systems, and to bring together researchers from different disciplines that share interests in modelling and analysis of timed systems and, as a generalisation, of hybrid systems. Typical topics include (but are not limited to):

Adaptation and specialisation of timing technology in application domains in which timing plays an important role (real-time software, embedded control, hardware circuits, biological systems, and problems of scheduling in manufacturing and telecommunications).

Important Dates

Registration

See the registration page of CONFESTA. All the registration process (including payment) is carried out by the CONFESTA 2018 organisation. There is a single registration that allows participants to visit sessions of each participating conference at will, but associated workshops require separate registration.

Publication

Venue

See the venue page of CONFESTA. The conference will take place in the UCAS campus in Huairou, a district in the northern part of Beijing, China, where it is part of CONFESTA and is colocated with CONCUR 2018, QEST 2018 and SETTA 2018.